Box

The main focus of this release has been to fix bugs in both the compiler and the GUI. Small improvements were also made. For Box, BBox now sets (rather than extending) the bounding box. The way the bounding box was handled in the Clip command was fixed. Improvements were made in the memory management of Box. Handling of FillStyle was fixed (it was ignored by Style). For Boxer, the Box output view was fixed: it did not expand correctly with some versions of PyGTK. Some small improvements were made in the documentation browser.

The Box graphic library was largely redesigned and rewritten in Box (rather than C). It is now cleaner and better structured: high level functionality (drawing polygons, etc) is derived from low level functionality (paths and command streams). New commands were added (figure clipping with "Clip" and matrix computation with "Constraints"). The old interface is still supported. Documentation was added with Dox, the Box documentation tool, and can be browsed from Boxer in a separate window. Boxer was adapted to the new graphic library. Bugs were fixed (most noticeably the copy of composite objects)

Boxer has been extended: multiple reference points can be selected and dragged simultaneously; the syntax highlighting of sources has been improved with an ad-hoc file for Box syntax; bugs when loading broken files were fixed. Box was also fixed and improved: a documentation system, Dox, was written; the core and g libraries were partially documented with this; it can now box and unbox objects of different types into the Obj object; raw access to Cairo is possible; a rewrite of the Box g library in Box (rather than C) has been started. These last features are still under development and will appear in future releases.

The GUI was extended with a new tool providing buttons to automatically produce pieces of Box source code. New users will get guidance: available commands are listed and help is provided via the status bar and dedicated buttons. The life of experienced users is also made easier: colors can be created using a dedicated window, fonts can be selected from a list, etc. Other minor improvements and bugfixes have been made in the behaviour of Boxer, in the behaviour of the Box graphics library, and in libboxcore (this fixes compilation on Mac OS X and MS Windows).

Bugfixes and a reworked memory management system. This release mainly fixes bugs. It does not bring new features. However, the memory management system has been largely rewritten. The memory management system is now aware of the "complex" types and knows how to create, destroy, copy, and relocate objects. The release prepares the ground for future features (boxing/unboxing through the Obj type, which will allow several fundamental improvements to both Box and Boxer).